Passive mercy killings occur when people who are brain-dead or permanently comatose or vegetative after injury, accident or illness are removed from life-support equipment (feeding tubes or respirators).
Cases include bomb victim David Heffer; abused children Shantana Speake and Thomas Griffin; gunshot victims Gema Marie Hubler and Tanya Marie Rivera (only after giving birth); injury victims Tony Bland, Karen Eickholdt, Joel Christopher Banks, and Mark Weaver; stroke victim Estelle Browning; and cocaine-imbibing Maximo Rene Mendez.
Paralyzed patients Nancy Gamble and Kenneth A. Bergstedt requested that their life support be removed.
Rudolfo Linares removed his son Samuel from life support while holding hospital staff at gunpoint to prevent intervention.
Routinely, doctors, patients or relatives decide whether potentially life-prolonging treatments should be started, stopped, or continued.
Active mercy killings include Philip Lee Saylor who shot his AIDS-suffering friend Steven Charles Jenkins; Roswell Gilbert who shot his Alzheimer-suffering wife Emily; a man who shot his fatally lion-mauled friend; British doctor Alan Cox who gave an elderly patient a heart-stopping injection; Delbert Ward who suffocated his ill brother William in his sleep; and three Austrian nurses and West German nurse Michaela Roeder who gave patients lethal injections.
Mercy-driven assisted suicides include Dr. Jack Kevorkian who started an IV saline solution for Alzheimer patient Janet Elaine Adkins, who then added coma-inducing thiopental and heart-stopping potassium chloride; and Bertram Harper who placed a plastic bag over his ill wife Virginia's head when sleeping pills and alcohol put her to sleep before she could do it herself.
